All posts tagged ‘Download’

[Above: A screenshot from Wizards of the Coast's new dndclassics.com website. See the above image gallery for a sneak peek of some of the re-released products, as well as Wizards staff members reminiscing about their favorite old-school D&D adventures and rule books.]

We all remember our first time. Perhaps your best friend taught you. Or, someone showed you at recess or in the library after school. Maybe it happened with a group of friends. Or, alone in your bedroom, you figured it out all by yourself.

No, no that. I'm talking about the first time you played Dungeons & Dragons.

For many of us, those early experiences of exploring dungeons, slaying monsters and devouring bowls of Cheetos are inextricably linked to specific gaming products and their charmingly amateurish artwork of animated skeletons, spider queens, and aqua-colored dungeon maps.

Who can forget B1: In Search of the Unknown? Included in the D&D Basic Set, this adventure introduced many gamers to D&D. Or Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits, the epic culmination of the seven-part adventure that began with the twin trilogies G1-3: Against the Giants and "Drow" series of modules D1-D3? Or, one of my personal favorites, the deadly Tomb of Horrors, whose endless traps and tricks and demi-lich Acererak killed nearly every adventuring party that tried to enter it?

Alas, many of those rulebooks and adventures from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s have disappeared -- forgotten, made obsolete, or discarded with the trash by parents when young gamers went off to college. (Thanks, Mom!). Only occasionally do these out-of-print products resurface at yard sales, online shopping sites, or at specialized auctions. If they can be located, they're often only available for exorbitant prices.

Now, they're been brought back to life. Like a cleric casting a resurrection spell, Wizards of the Coast, the maker of D&D, is waving its magic wand and raising these lost products from the dead.

GeekDad can exclusively report that Wizards of the Coast is announcing today the launch of dndclassics.com, a site selling hundreds of these decades-old products available for download in PDF format.

The products for sale include a combination of core rules books, adventure series (what us old gamers call "modules"), supplement materials, and various backlist products from most of the D&D rules systems known to gaming-kind -- Basic, AD&D, AD&D 2nd Edition, 3rd Edition, 3.5 and 4.0 -- as well as specific campaign settings like Planescape and Ravenloft. Much of the materials on dndclassics.com date to the "Golden Age" of role-playing games, back when Gary Gygax's TSR Hobbies, Inc. ran the role-playing game industry, before his company was purchased by Wizards of the Coast.

"A lot people have a passion for and memories of these older products," said Liz Schuh, who directs publishing and licensing for Dungeons & Dragons. "We don't want them to go to torrent sites. Why not give them a legal route?" Schuh added that idea of re-releasing old products was a result of listening to fans on the forums, with the goal of letting "people play the D&D they want in the format they want."

In the first wave of items available today, more than 80 products can be downloaded from dndclassic.com, everything from the 1981 D&D Basic Game "Red Box" Rulebook to the 4th edition adventure H1: Keep on the Shadowfell, originally released in 2008. Prices range from $4.99 for most modules, to $17.99 for the newer manuals and supplements. The site is operated in partnership with DriveThruRPG, which claims to be "the largest RPG download store" on the Internet.

Mike Mearls, senior manager of Dungeons & Dragons research and development, likened the project of sifting through his company's vast archives and deciding which products to make available again much like a movie studio "going through a back catalogue" of old movies to decide what to release on DVD and Blu-ray. "You can always find these things on eBay," said Mearls. "But like baseball cards in the 1970s, no one took care of them. You have to pay a premium for it."

The PDFs are made from fresh scans of these old products. "We've rescanned everything," Schuh said. "It's the highest quality you can get out there." (I'd generally concur: The scans are good quality, and best of all, the PDFs are searchable. For example, you can search 1980's Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits for all instances of the word "Lolth" or "spider ship," which could come in handy during game play. I did see a few errors in the reproduction of multi-part gatefold-style maps, but hopefully these glitches will be resolved.)

Nostalgia is a powerful force in gaming, especially for gamers of my generation who first played D&D in the 1970s and 1980s. Was there something lost along the way, as TSR and RPGs became more successful? Is there anything we can learn from going back in time, and reading or trying to play the game with these old modules and rule books?

Mearls feels that players should appreciate the older game products, which allowed for more varied, less predictable styles of play. "Older style adventures, there is no script," he said, adding that players enjoy the "uncertainty" of the games' "element of chaos."

In the past year, Wizards has also been releasing premium print versions of AD&D rulebooks like their Dungeon Masters Guide and Monster Manual. They are scheduled to release more 1st edition AD&D and 2nd edition core rulebooks, and key 3.5 books, in the coming months.

The company also plans on releasing "conversion notes" so the older gaming products available on dndclassics.com can be played with newer editions of D&D, including the latest revamp of the rules, what is being called "D&D Next," now in development and scheduled to be released sometime in 2014.

Personally, I'm excited to get my hands on a copy of the AD&D manuals Deities & Demigods, from 1981, which finally let Dungeon Masters pit immortals like the Norse god Thor or heroes like Fritz Leiber's The Gray Mouser against players. (The book also came in handy for school reports on mythology. See the image gallery for more on that.) It'll be cool to see Vault of the Drow again, too. Gary Gygax's seminal 1978's module more or less introduced the idea of "dark elves" to fantasy.

Hopefully, in the next wave of products released by Wizards later this year, we'll see some of my other favorite items, like S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, which if you recall was actually a crash-landed space ship that dungeoneers had to explore. That blew my geeky mind back in the 1980s.

Oh, and that deadly, nasty, sadomasochistic and awesome Tombs of Horrors. I can't wait to take on that lich again--or die trying.

[ADDITIONAL NOTE: Thanks to a watchful reader, I have a correction: I neglected to mention in my original post that Wizards is also releasing, on March 19 of this year, Dungeons of Dread, these very same S-Series dungeons I was just pining for, in a premium hardcover edition. The collection includes four classic, stand-alone Advanced Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules: S1: Tomb of Horrors; S2: White Plume Mountain; S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks; and S4: The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. More info.]

Created by Tom Moldvay, this 1981 edition of the D&D Basic Rulebook was actually the second edition of Basic D&D. The first edition, created by J. Eric Holmes in 1977, had a blueprint-style pale blue cover.

This 1981 edition was sold as part of the boxed D&D Basic Set as well as a separate product. It was the first true stand alone edition of what became "Basic D&D." Previous editions of Basic D&D had been based on OD&D ("Original D&D").

G1-3: Against the Giants was originally published as three separate adventures: G1: Steading of the Giant Chief, G2: The Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, and G3: Hall of the Fire Giant King in 1978. Later, in 1981, they were collected in this G1-G3 edition.

The introductory text sets the scene: "Giants have been raiding the lands of men in large bands, with giants of different sorts in these marauding groups. Death and destruction have been laid heavily upon every place these monsters have visited. A party of the bravest and most powerful adventurers has been assembled and given the charge to punish the miscreant giants."

This trilogy, written by Gary Gyagx, also served as the start to the seven-part campaign that also includes D1: Descent into the Depths of the Earth, D2: Shrine of the Kuo-Toa, and D3: Vault of the Drow, and Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits -- named the top-rated adventure of all time by Dungeon Magazine.

Gygax once said he was inspired to create the "giants" series by the "heroic adventuring" of The Incomplete Enchanter by Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague deCamp.

Bugbear guards, orc guards, sink holes, covered pits and portcullises -- all of D&D's classic dangers can be found in Against the Giants, this classic dungeon from 1978.

Says Mike Mearls, senior manager of Dungeons & Dragons research and development, "I’ve run this adventure in 3rd edition, 4th edition, and in D&D Next. It’s a litmus test of sorts for our playtesting. If the current version of D&D can’t handle The Steading of the Hill Giant Chieftain as written, there’s something wrong with the game. The tipping point for this adventure always comes early on. Do you sneak in and spy on the giants, or charge on in for a frontal assault? If you’ve read the adventure, you know what the right answer is."

Some of the charmingly amateurish artwork from Against the Giants. D&D's artists have gotten better, but cruder images such as seen here are seared into the memory banks of many an older gamer who played D&D back in the 1970s and 1980s.

In 2004, the Giants series (grouped with the entire 7-part giants-drow-demonweb series) was ranked 1st in the greatest Dungeons & Dragons adventure of all time by Dungeon Magazine.

T1-4: The Temple of Elemental Evil (1985), written by Gary Gygax and Frank Mentzer, was published in August 1985 as TSR's first "super module." Its 128-page book was easily double the size of any of TSR's adventures to date; it also included 16-page map book.

The first part of this mega-adventure was published years earlier as T1: "The Village of Hommlet" (1979). It was named the #4 adventure in Dungeon magazine's "The 30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time" list.

This map comes from N1: Against The Cult of the Reptile God, whose intro text begins this way:

"Terror by night! The village of Orlane is dying. Once a small and thriving community, Orlane has become a maze of locked doors and frightened faces. Strangers are shunned, trade has withered. Rumors flourish, growing wilder with each retelling. Terrified peasants flee their homes, abandoning their farms with no explanation. Others simply disappear …

"No one seems to know the cause of the decay -- why are there no clues? Who skulks through the twisted shadows of the night? Who or what is behind the doom that has overtaken the village? It will take a brave and skillful band of adventurers to solve the dark riddle of Orlane!"

N1: Against The Cult of the Reptile God appeared in 1982, and was written by Douglas Niles. It was named #19 in Dungeon Magazine's "30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time."

Deities & Demigods (1980) was the fourth hardcover release for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Despite being "just" a supplement, Gary Gygax saw Deities & Demigods as a way deities could take their proper spot in D&D campaigns as the patrons of clerics and as the exemplars of a character's ideal alignment.

Sadly, despite Gygax's original intent, for many players Deities & Demigods became another compendium of ultra-powerful "monsters" that could be killed by players.

It also came in handy for term papers. Says D&D's R&D Team Member James Wyatt: "I used this book as the main source for a paper I wrote in like 10th grade comparing various world mythologies. I was lucky to get a C!"

Perseus has armor class 3 and fights as the equivalent of a 15th level paladin.

Deities and Demigods gave all your favorite gods and heroes stats so your characters could kick their asses.

Mike Mearls, senior manager of Dungeons & Dragons research and development, also used the tome for school work. "I used this book as the primary reference for a project on mythology in 6th grade. Maybe my teacher was less discriminating than James’, but I got an A."

One of the cool aspects of Deities and Demigods were all the cosmological and religious answers it provided.

The holy text finally explained how, for example, the inner planes -- planet earth, the solar system, the universe and all of its parallels such as The Positive Material Plane, The Elemental Planes, The Ethereal Plane, The Plane of Shadow, etc. -- are connected to this funky disk of outer planes (e.g. The Outer Planes of Alignment) via the "yellow brick road" of the astral plane.

D3: Vault of the Drow, from 1978 and written by Gary Gygax, was the sixth adventure released by TSR. Like its two predecessors in the D-series, it was originally published with a purple monochrome cover (shown above).

During his lifetime, Gygax offered a few different sources for his drow. Ultimately, they're probably derived from the Svartálfaheimr — the dark elves of Norse mythology.
The drow have been making appearances since G3: Hall of the Fire Giant King, but they are given the full treatment here, including a description of one of their cities and details on their cutthroat noble families.

The Vault was the 6th part in a seven-part campaign that began with the three-part Against the Giants series and continued in the D-series, concluding with module Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits.

Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits was part seven of an epic campaign that began with the giants and drow series. In this last installment, characters are transported to another plane and find themselves in the muti-dimensional labyrinth known as the Demonweb. Characters must find their way out of the web, and then must defeat the evil demigoddess Lolth. Scary stuff.

This map shows the inter-weaved, multi-dimensional lair of Lolth, the evil spider queen, that befuddled many a player.

Bruce Cordell, another member of D&D's R&D team, offered this reminiscence:

"Queen of the Demonweb Pits was the first published adventure I experienced as a player. Because only my friend JD and I were available, we each made up 2 characters to adventure through the module. My two characters were Yor Demonslayer, a fighter, and Everin the Enchanter, an elf wizard. I was so excited by these characters, who were also the highest level characters I'd yet played, that I drew each one, colorized the drawings, backed each on cardboard, and protected them each under a layer of transparent grocery "cling-wrap." (30 years later, I still have them.)

"Unfortunately, my friend JD interpreted his –1 penalty on attack rolls curse he gained during the adventure to mean that he should act unpredictably. At one of the Demonweb crossings over an endless abyss, his character pushed Everin over, exclaiming, "I'm cursed!" So, that was the end for Everin."

The Ghost Tower of Inverness was originally written for the Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Game Tournament at Wintercon VIII, Detroit, 1979. Used in official tournaments, this adventure contains a challenging setting, a scoring system and characters specially prepared for the adventure.

The module was named #30 in Dungeon Magazine's "30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time."

From 1980-1983, Dungeons & Dragons was exploding in popularity, and most players first bought and used the Basic Set as their introduction to the game. Because of this fact, this module B2: Keep on the Borderlands, which appeared in the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, went on to become the module with the largest print run of all time, with an estimated 1.5 million copies made and distributed.

Once it was created in 1979, B2: Keep on the Borderlands immediately replaced In Search of the Unknown in the Basic boxed set.

This module was voted number 7 in Dungeon Magazine's "30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time."

First appearing in 1998, this anthology of eight separate but linked adventures, Tales from the Infinite Staircase, takes adventurers to exotic locales throughout the planes. A crossover product with the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, this is product serves as an introduction to Planescape, another campaign setting.

"Two hundred years ago, the great dwarf smith Durgeddin the Black built Khundrukar, a hidden stronghold for his war of vengeance against all orckind. For years Durgeddin labored, until the orcs discovered Khundrukar and stormed the citadel, slaying all within. Legends say that Durgeddin's masterful blades and glittering treasures were never found…."

The Forge of Fury, created in 2000 by Richard Baker, was the second in a series of eight stand-alone adventures for 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons. It details Khundrukar's five extensive levels of fierce tribes, dangerous obstacles, diabolical traps, and monstrous creatures.

In 2004, Forge of Fury was ranked the 12th greatest Dungeons & Dragons adventure of all time by Dungeon Magazine.

[Above: A screenshot from Wizards of the Coast's new dndclassics.com website. See the above image gallery for a sneak peek of some of the re-released products, as well as Wizards staff members reminiscing about their favorite old-school D&D adventures and rule books.]

We all remember our first time. Perhaps your best friend taught you. Or, someone showed you at recess or in the library after school. Maybe it happened with a group of friends. Or, alone in your bedroom, you figured it out all by yourself.

No, no that. I'm talking about the first time you played Dungeons & Dragons.

For many of us, those early experiences of exploring dungeons, slaying monsters and devouring bowls of Cheetos are inextricably linked to specific gaming products and their charmingly amateurish artwork of animated skeletons, spider queens, and aqua-colored dungeon maps.

Who can forget B1: In Search of the Unknown? Included in the D&D Basic Set, this adventure introduced many gamers to D&D. Or Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits, the epic culmination of the seven-part adventure that began with the twin trilogies G1-3: Against the Giants and "Drow" series of modules D1-D3? Or, one of my personal favorites, the deadly Tomb of Horrors, whose endless traps and tricks and demi-lich Acererak killed nearly every adventuring party that tried to enter it?

Alas, many of those rulebooks and adventures from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s have disappeared -- forgotten, made obsolete, or discarded with the trash by parents when young gamers went off to college. (Thanks, Mom!). Only occasionally do these out-of-print products resurface at yard sales, online shopping sites, or at specialized auctions. If they can be located, they're often only available for exorbitant prices.

Now, they're been brought back to life. Like a cleric casting a resurrection spell, Wizards of the Coast, the maker of D&D, is waving its magic wand and raising these lost products from the dead.

GeekDad can exclusively report that Wizards of the Coast is announcing today the launch of dndclassics.com, a site selling hundreds of these decades-old products available for download in PDF format.

The products for sale include a combination of core rules books, adventure series (what us old gamers call "modules"), supplement materials, and various backlist products from most of the D&D rules systems known to gaming-kind -- Basic, AD&D, AD&D 2nd Edition, 3rd Edition, 3.5 and 4.0 -- as well as specific campaign settings like Planescape and Ravenloft. Much of the materials on dndclassics.com date to the "Golden Age" of role-playing games, back when Gary Gygax's TSR Hobbies, Inc. ran the role-playing game industry, before his company was purchased by Wizards of the Coast.

"A lot people have a passion for and memories of these older products," said Liz Schuh, who directs publishing and licensing for Dungeons & Dragons. "We don't want them to go to torrent sites. Why not give them a legal route?" Schuh added that idea of re-releasing old products was a result of listening to fans on the forums, with the goal of letting "people play the D&D they want in the format they want."

In the first wave of items available today, more than 80 products can be downloaded from dndclassic.com, everything from the 1981 D&D Basic Game "Red Box" Rulebook to the 4th edition adventure H1: Keep on the Shadowfell, originally released in 2008. Prices range from $4.99 for most modules, to $17.99 for the newer manuals and supplements. The site is operated in partnership with DriveThruRPG, which claims to be "the largest RPG download store" on the Internet.

Mike Mearls, senior manager of Dungeons & Dragons research and development, likened the project of sifting through his company's vast archives and deciding which products to make available again much like a movie studio "going through a back catalogue" of old movies to decide what to release on DVD and Blu-ray. "You can always find these things on eBay," said Mearls. "But like baseball cards in the 1970s, no one took care of them. You have to pay a premium for it."

The PDFs are made from fresh scans of these old products. "We've rescanned everything," Schuh said. "It's the highest quality you can get out there." (I'd generally concur: The scans are good quality, and best of all, the PDFs are searchable. For example, you can search 1980's Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits for all instances of the word "Lolth" or "spider ship," which could come in handy during game play. I did see a few errors in the reproduction of multi-part gatefold-style maps, but hopefully these glitches will be resolved.)

Nostalgia is a powerful force in gaming, especially for gamers of my generation who first played D&D in the 1970s and 1980s. Was there something lost along the way, as TSR and RPGs became more successful? Is there anything we can learn from going back in time, and reading or trying to play the game with these old modules and rule books?

Mearls feels that players should appreciate the older game products, which allowed for more varied, less predictable styles of play. "Older style adventures, there is no script," he said, adding that players enjoy the "uncertainty" of the games' "element of chaos."

In the past year, Wizards has also been releasing premium print versions of AD&D rulebooks like their Dungeon Masters Guide and Monster Manual. They are scheduled to release more 1st edition AD&D and 2nd edition core rulebooks, and key 3.5 books, in the coming months.

The company also plans on releasing "conversion notes" so the older gaming products available on dndclassics.com can be played with newer editions of D&D, including the latest revamp of the rules, what is being called "D&D Next," now in development and scheduled to be released sometime in 2014.

Personally, I'm excited to get my hands on a copy of the AD&D manuals Deities & Demigods, from 1981, which finally let Dungeon Masters pit immortals like the Norse god Thor or heroes like Fritz Leiber's The Gray Mouser against players. (The book also came in handy for school reports on mythology. See the image gallery for more on that.) It'll be cool to see Vault of the Drow again, too. Gary Gygax's seminal 1978's module more or less introduced the idea of "dark elves" to fantasy.

Hopefully, in the next wave of products released by Wizards later this year, we'll see some of my other favorite items, like S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, which if you recall was actually a crash-landed space ship that dungeoneers had to explore. That blew my geeky mind back in the 1980s.

Oh, and that deadly, nasty, sadomasochistic and awesome Tombs of Horrors. I can't wait to take on that lich again--or die trying.

[ADDITIONAL NOTE: Thanks to a watchful reader, I have a correction: I neglected to mention in my original post that Wizards is also releasing, on March 19 of this year, Dungeons of Dread, these very same S-Series dungeons I was just pining for, in a premium hardcover edition. The collection includes four classic, stand-alone Advanced Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules: S1: Tomb of Horrors; S2: White Plume Mountain; S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks; and S4: The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. More info.]

Created by Tom Moldvay, this 1981 edition of the D&D Basic Rulebook was actually the second edition of Basic D&D. The first edition, created by J. Eric Holmes in 1977, had a blueprint-style pale blue cover.

This 1981 edition was sold as part of the boxed D&D Basic Set as well as a separate product. It was the first true stand alone edition of what became "Basic D&D." Previous editions of Basic D&D had been based on OD&D ("Original D&D").

G1-3: Against the Giants was originally published as three separate adventures: G1: Steading of the Giant Chief, G2: The Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, and G3: Hall of the Fire Giant King in 1978. Later, in 1981, they were collected in this G1-G3 edition.

The introductory text sets the scene: "Giants have been raiding the lands of men in large bands, with giants of different sorts in these marauding groups. Death and destruction have been laid heavily upon every place these monsters have visited. A party of the bravest and most powerful adventurers has been assembled and given the charge to punish the miscreant giants."

This trilogy, written by Gary Gyagx, also served as the start to the seven-part campaign that also includes D1: Descent into the Depths of the Earth, D2: Shrine of the Kuo-Toa, and D3: Vault of the Drow, and Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits -- named the top-rated adventure of all time by Dungeon Magazine.

Gygax once said he was inspired to create the "giants" series by the "heroic adventuring" of The Incomplete Enchanter by Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague deCamp.

Bugbear guards, orc guards, sink holes, covered pits and portcullises -- all of D&D's classic dangers can be found in Against the Giants, this classic dungeon from 1978.

Says Mike Mearls, senior manager of Dungeons & Dragons research and development, "I’ve run this adventure in 3rd edition, 4th edition, and in D&D Next. It’s a litmus test of sorts for our playtesting. If the current version of D&D can’t handle The Steading of the Hill Giant Chieftain as written, there’s something wrong with the game. The tipping point for this adventure always comes early on. Do you sneak in and spy on the giants, or charge on in for a frontal assault? If you’ve read the adventure, you know what the right answer is."

Some of the charmingly amateurish artwork from Against the Giants. D&D's artists have gotten better, but cruder images such as seen here are seared into the memory banks of many an older gamer who played D&D back in the 1970s and 1980s.

In 2004, the Giants series (grouped with the entire 7-part giants-drow-demonweb series) was ranked 1st in the greatest Dungeons & Dragons adventure of all time by Dungeon Magazine.

T1-4: The Temple of Elemental Evil (1985), written by Gary Gygax and Frank Mentzer, was published in August 1985 as TSR's first "super module." Its 128-page book was easily double the size of any of TSR's adventures to date; it also included 16-page map book.

The first part of this mega-adventure was published years earlier as T1: "The Village of Hommlet" (1979). It was named the #4 adventure in Dungeon magazine's "The 30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time" list.

This map comes from N1: Against The Cult of the Reptile God, whose intro text begins this way:

"Terror by night! The village of Orlane is dying. Once a small and thriving community, Orlane has become a maze of locked doors and frightened faces. Strangers are shunned, trade has withered. Rumors flourish, growing wilder with each retelling. Terrified peasants flee their homes, abandoning their farms with no explanation. Others simply disappear …

"No one seems to know the cause of the decay -- why are there no clues? Who skulks through the twisted shadows of the night? Who or what is behind the doom that has overtaken the village? It will take a brave and skillful band of adventurers to solve the dark riddle of Orlane!"

N1: Against The Cult of the Reptile God appeared in 1982, and was written by Douglas Niles. It was named #19 in Dungeon Magazine's "30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time."

Deities & Demigods (1980) was the fourth hardcover release for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Despite being "just" a supplement, Gary Gygax saw Deities & Demigods as a way deities could take their proper spot in D&D campaigns as the patrons of clerics and as the exemplars of a character's ideal alignment.

Sadly, despite Gygax's original intent, for many players Deities & Demigods became another compendium of ultra-powerful "monsters" that could be killed by players.

It also came in handy for term papers. Says D&D's R&D Team Member James Wyatt: "I used this book as the main source for a paper I wrote in like 10th grade comparing various world mythologies. I was lucky to get a C!"

Perseus has armor class 3 and fights as the equivalent of a 15th level paladin.

Deities and Demigods gave all your favorite gods and heroes stats so your characters could kick their asses.

Mike Mearls, senior manager of Dungeons & Dragons research and development, also used the tome for school work. "I used this book as the primary reference for a project on mythology in 6th grade. Maybe my teacher was less discriminating than James’, but I got an A."

One of the cool aspects of Deities and Demigods were all the cosmological and religious answers it provided.

The holy text finally explained how, for example, the inner planes -- planet earth, the solar system, the universe and all of its parallels such as The Positive Material Plane, The Elemental Planes, The Ethereal Plane, The Plane of Shadow, etc. -- are connected to this funky disk of outer planes (e.g. The Outer Planes of Alignment) via the "yellow brick road" of the astral plane.

Sorry, Father Mulcahy, but Gary Gygax knows best. Mystery solved!

D3: Vault of the Drow, from 1978 and written by Gary Gygax, was the sixth adventure released by TSR. Like its two predecessors in the D-series, it was originally published with a purple monochrome cover (shown above).

During his lifetime, Gygax offered a few different sources for his drow. Ultimately, they're probably derived from the Svartálfaheimr — the dark elves of Norse mythology.
The drow have been making appearances since G3: Hall of the Fire Giant King, but they are given the full treatment here, including a description of one of their cities and details on their cutthroat noble families.

The Vault was the 6th part in a seven-part campaign that began with the three-part Against the Giants series and continued in the D-series, concluding with module Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits.

Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits was part seven of an epic campaign that began with the giants and drow series. In this last installment, characters are transported to another plane and find themselves in the muti-dimensional labyrinth known as the Demonweb. Characters must find their way out of the web, and then must defeat the evil demigoddess Lolth. Scary stuff.

This map shows the inter-weaved, multi-dimensional lair of Lolth, the evil spider queen, that befuddled many a player.

Bruce Cordell, another member of D&D's R&D team, offered this reminiscence:

"Queen of the Demonweb Pits was the first published adventure I experienced as a player. Because only my friend JD and I were available, we each made up 2 characters to adventure through the module. My two characters were Yor Demonslayer, a fighter, and Everin the Enchanter, an elf wizard. I was so excited by these characters, who were also the highest level characters I'd yet played, that I drew each one, colorized the drawings, backed each on cardboard, and protected them each under a layer of transparent grocery "cling-wrap." (30 years later, I still have them.)

"Unfortunately, my friend JD interpreted his –1 penalty on attack rolls curse he gained during the adventure to mean that he should act unpredictably. At one of the Demonweb crossings over an endless abyss, his character pushed Everin over, exclaiming, "I'm cursed!" So, that was the end for Everin."

Fiend Folio, which appeared in 1981, was the fifth hardcover book for AD&D, and the first book not part of Gary Gygax's original plan for the AD&D game.

Fiend Folio was also the first AD&D hardcover not produced at TSR or even in the United States. It began as a column for Games Workshop's White Dwarf magazine, edited by British gamer Don Turnbull.

The Ghost Tower of Inverness was originally written for the Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Game Tournament at Wintercon VIII, Detroit, 1979. Used in official tournaments, this adventure contains a challenging setting, a scoring system and characters specially prepared for the adventure.

The module was named #30 in Dungeon Magazine's "30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time."

First created for a tournament in 1979, C2: The Ghost Tower of Inverness, published in 1980, was written by Allen Hammack. It was the second adventure in D&D's competition series, "C."

From 1980-1983, Dungeons & Dragons was exploding in popularity, and most players first bought and used the Basic Set as their introduction to the game. Because of this fact, this module B2: Keep on the Borderlands, which appeared in the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, went on to become the module with the largest print run of all time, with an estimated 1.5 million copies made and distributed.

Once it was created in 1979, B2: Keep on the Borderlands immediately replaced In Search of the Unknown in the Basic boxed set.

This module was voted number 7 in Dungeon Magazine's "30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time."

"Do you have rope? A dagger? Holy water?"

The ubiquitous equipment list that players use to outfit their characters appears in the pages of Keep on the Borderlands.

OK, fine, we'll let you see some lost products from the 1990s, too.

First appearing in 1998, this anthology of eight separate but linked adventures, Tales from the Infinite Staircase, takes adventurers to exotic locales throughout the planes. A crossover product with the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, this is product serves as an introduction to Planescape, another campaign setting.

"Two hundred years ago, the great dwarf smith Durgeddin the Black built Khundrukar, a hidden stronghold for his war of vengeance against all orckind. For years Durgeddin labored, until the orcs discovered Khundrukar and stormed the citadel, slaying all within. Legends say that Durgeddin's masterful blades and glittering treasures were never found…."

The Forge of Fury, created in 2000 by Richard Baker, was the second in a series of eight stand-alone adventures for 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons. It details Khundrukar's five extensive levels of fierce tribes, dangerous obstacles, diabolical traps, and monstrous creatures.

In 2004, Forge of Fury was ranked the 12th greatest Dungeons & Dragons adventure of all time by Dungeon Magazine.

With all the excitement around Double Fine Production’s Kickstarter success it’s easy to forget where they have come from, and their other successes in unusual video-game development strategies.

Case in point are their “Amnesia Fortnight” games where the developers were granted two weeks to forget their current big project and tasked to develop an original prototype. This resulted in Stacking, Costume Quest, Iron Brigade and Sesame Street Once Upon a Monster. It also signaled a switch from big boxed games towards smaller directly-delivered experiences.

Two of these Amnesia Fortnight games, Costume Quest and Stacking, along with Double Fine’s classic game Psychonauts, are available on PC. Amazon currently offers them in a triple pack as well as selling them separately for download.

Always keen on a videogame bargain, this led to me trying out these games with my kids. I found that they’ve taken to them pretty quickly. Stacking is particularly interesting, not only because of the steam-punk presentation and open world to explore, but because it offers a role-play upgrade system executed with Russian stacking dolls — hence the name.

Game and Watch games are what formed the heart of Nintendo. Zelda, Mario, Donkey Kong, they all started as little Liquid Crystal Burned outlines on these diminutive handheld devices. It’s no bad thing then that these are getting a fresh airing via DSi Ware – these are the games you can download straight to your DSi.

I’ve just been trying out three of my old favorites: Judge, Cement Factory and Chef. I liked each of these for very different reasons originally, and the same is true of their DSi Ware incarnations. Each is lovingly reproduced to look and sound exactly the same as they did back in the day – so much so that my other half instantly remarked “hey, that sounds like the game my brother had when I was ten” and indeed it was the same game.

Game and Watch: Judge

Judge is a reaction game. Each round begins with a count down, before a number is revealed for each player. You then have a split second to decide whether you attack or dodge. You can only successfully attack if you have the highest number.

It’s like snap, but the scoring incentivizes you to go on the offensive. Dodging an attack awards you one point, but landing an attack awards you the difference between the two numbers. Get it wrong though and your opponent gets two points. First to 99 wins, knife edge stuff.

Mario’s Cement Factory was a classic Game and Watch game that tasked the player (as Mario) to open up cement shoots so they don’t overflow and traverse the two central lifts to get to the different containers.

Just three buttons control the action, left/right and pull. The player needs to learn how to time their movement to avoid falling off the lifts. They also need a strategy to manage the four different cement shoots to keep things moving. This starts off pretty easy but soon gets more difficult as the game speeds up.

Chef is a simple premise that often crops up in Game and Watch titles – keep things from falling on the floor. Like Ball and Helmet a series of objects rains down on the player as they rush from one to the other trying to keep them in the air.

In itself this is a little frantic at first. This isn’t helped by the fact that each (cooking) item flies to a different height and speed. Add to this a mischievous cat who (un)helpfully prods items to send them back down quicker and you have to have your wits about you to do well.

As well as enjoying revisiting my childhood entertainment, it was also pretty special to be able to share this with my kids. They soon took to the games, and their simplicity meant that even my youngest could join in. The favorite so far is the two player challenge in Judge. I’m sure we’ll be downloading the rest of these Game and Watch games via DSi Ware before too long.